AwEE - Improving Privacy Awareness by Leveraging Gamification Principles

In today's digital society, companies regularly collect vast amounts of personal data from their users, raising profound privacy and ethical concerns. Yet, despite many cases of large personal data breaches being documented, most users remain unaware of the real-time flow of their information while they use online services. We describe the design and development of AwEE, a browser extension designed to address this gap by enhancing privacy awareness among users, incorporating gamification principles. It provides real-time insights during users' web browsing, highlighting requests made to companies with known issues in data handling practices. To increase user engagement, the extension incorporates various gamification elements. We detail the results of a preliminary evaluation of AwEE, conducted in an academic context. The results from such evaluation suggest that users find the tool both enjoyable and informative, demonstrating the potential of combining privacy tools with gamification to promote greater awareness and proactive privacy management. The tool is openly available on Zenodo.